DELIVERED BEFORE THE 

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At Buffala, Friday, October 9, 1857, 



ADDRESS 



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DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



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BY EDWARD EVERETT, 



At Biittalo, Fridii}, (>( tobcr 0, 1857. 




ALBANY: 

VAN BHNTIIUYSEN, PRINTER, 407 BROADWAY 

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ADDRESS. 



Mr. Presifle///, Gov. Krn^, Prcs/dcnf Fi/l///ore, 

Ladies and Gt/illemen, Friaids and, F dloii; Citizens: 

The surpassingly beautiful spot where we are 
assembled this day is one of no ordinary interest. 
We are met in full view of the outlet of one of 
the most considerable of those inland seas which 
form so marked a feature in the geography of our 
continent. We can almost hear the roar of its 
waters as they plunge, at j^onder world-renowned 
cataract, to the lower level of the sister lake. 
The prosperous city, under whose immediate 
auspices we are assembled, has, within the expe- 
rience of living men, grown up from a small 
village on the skirts of an Indian reservation, to 
be the busy mart of a vast inland trade. Behind 
us, uniting in what may truly be called the bonds 
of holy matrimony, the waters of the mighty 
lakes with the waters of the mighty ocean, endur- 
ing monument of one of the most honored sons of 
New York, stretches far to the east that noble 



4 

canal, which alone, perhaps, among the works of 
its class, has sustained itself in the competition 
with the railroad and the locomotive. In front 
of us, spread out the fertile domains of a friendly 
neighboring power, the home of a kindred race, 
separated from us but Ijy a narrow stream ; a region 
to which we have closely grappled with hooks of 
steel, or at least with hooks of railroad iron, and 
the still stronger bonds of a mutually beneficial 
commercial reciprocity. We have come together 
on this interesting spot, at the invitation of the 
New York State Agricultural Society, to hold the 
farmer's autumnal holiday. From the remotest 
quarters of the Empire State and her sister repub- 
lics, the railroads which have thrown their vast 
network over the country, have afforded a ready 
conveyance to multitudes. Other multitudes have 
descended your magnificent lake, in those unparal- 
leled steamers, which, with scarce an interval of 
time, have taken the place of the bark canoe that 
skimmed its surface at the beginning of the cen- 
tury. Others from the adjacent province have 
crossed that noble susj^ension bridge, a wonder of 
engineering skill. In behalf of the respectable 
association in whose name I have the honor to 
speak, on this spot iVom which the simple children 



of the forei^t have yet not AvhoUy disappeared, 
from whatever quarter, by whatever conveyance 
you have assembled, I bid you welcome. Friends, 
fellow-citizens, welcome ! The woods have put on 
their gorgeous robes of many colors to receive you ; 
the vaporous atmosphere has for this day hung up 
its misty veil, to shield you from the too fervid 
sun ; the sparkling waters of Niagara River bid 
you " HAIL AND FAREWELL," as they hurry down- 
wanl to their great agony ; and Autumn sj^reads 
before you the rustic hospitality of her harvest 
home. 

There is a temptation, when men assemble on 
occasions of this kind, to exaggerate the import- 
ance of the pursuit in which they are engaged, in 
comparison with the other callings of life. When 
farmers, or merchants, or manufacturers, or teach- 
ers, or professional men, come together to cele- 
brate an anniversary, or an important event, or to 
do honor to some distinguished individual, it is 
almost a matter of course that their particular 
occupation or profession should be represented by 
those on whom the duty of speaking for their 
associates devolves as the most important profes- 
sion or calling. No great harm is done by these 
rhetorical exaggerations, which in tlie long run 



G . 

must correct each other ; and which, if tiiey have 
the effect of making men more content with their 
own pursuits, are not very pernicious, even il' 
they remain uncorrected. 

Although these chiims which men set up, each 
for the paramount imjDortance of his own occupa- 
tion, cannot of (course be all well founded, it may 
be maintained that each of the great pursuits of 
life is indispensable to the prosperity of all the 
rest. Without agriculture and manufactures, the 
merchant would have nothing to transport or 
exchange. Without commerce, the farmer and 
the manufacturer would be confined to a barter 
trade, in a limited home circle of demand and 
supply. In this respect, all the great pursuits of 
life in a civilized community may be deemed of 
bqual importance, because they have each and all 
for their object to supj)ly some one of the great 
wants of our nature ; because each is necessary, 
to some extent at least, to the prosperity of every 
other ; and because they are all brought by the 
luitural sympathies of our being into an harmoni- 
ous system, and form that noble and beautiful 
whole which we call civilized society. 

But, without derogating from the importance 
of any of the other pursuits and occupations, we 



may safely, I think, claim for Agriculture in some 
respects a certain precedence before them all. It 
has been said to be the great and final object of 
government to get twelve impartial and intelli- 
gent men into the juy box ; by whicli, of course, 
is meant that the administration of equal justice 
between man and man is the primary object ol' 
civilized and social life. But the teacher, secu- 
lar or spiritual, might plausibly urge that it is of 
prior importance that the comnmnity should have 
the elements, at least, of mental and moral culture, 
and be taught the obligations of an oath, before 
any twelve of its members should take part in 
the administration of justice. The physician 
might contend that health is of greater import- 
ance than the trial by jury ; and with greater 
reason it might be claimed for Agriculture that it 
supplies the first want of our nature : the daily 
call of the great family of man for his daily 
bread — the call that must be answered before the 
work of life, high or low, can begin. Plaintift' 
and defendant, judge and jury, must break their 
fast before they meet in court ; and, if the word 
of a witty poet can be taken, certain very import- 
ant consequences sometimes happen to culprits, 
in order that jurymen may get to their dinners. 



But, to speak in a more fitting and serious 
strain, I must confess that there has always seemed 
to me something ajDproaching the sublime in this 
view of Agriculture, which (such is the effect of 
familiarity) does not produce an imj)ression on 
our minds in proportion to the grandeur of the 
idea. We seem, on the contrary, to take for 
granted, that we live by a kind of mechanical 
necessity, and that our frames are like watches 
made, if such a thing were possible, to go without 
winding up, in virtue of some innate principle of 
subsistence independent of our wills ; which is 
indeed in other respects true. But it is not less 
true that our existence, as individuals or commu- 
nities, must be kept up by a daily supjoly of food, 
directly or indirectly furnished by Agriculture; 
and that, if this supply should wholly fail for ten 
days, all this multitudinous, striving, ambitious 
humanity, these nations and kindred and tribes 
of men, w^ould j)erish from the face of the e^irth, 
by the most ghastly form of dissolution. Strike 
out of existence at once ten days' sujDj^ly of eight 
or ten articles, such as Indian corn, wheat, rye, 
potatoes, rice, millet, the date, the banana, and 
the bread-fruit, with a half-dozen others which 
serve as the forao;e of the domestic animals, and 



I) 

the human race would be extinct. The houses 
we inhabit, the monuments we erect, the trees 
we plant, stand in some cases for ages ; but our 
own frames — the stout limbs, the skilful hands 
that build the houses, and set ujd the monuments, 
and plant the trees — have to be built up, re-cre- 
ated, every day ; and this must be done from 
the fruits of the earth gathered by Agriculture. 
Everything else is luxury, convenience, comfort — 
food is indispensable. 

Then consider the bewildering extent of this 
daily demand and supply, which you will allow 
me to -place before you in a somewhat coarse 
mechanical illustration. The human race is usu- 
ally estimated at about one thousand millions of 
individuals. If the sustenance of a portion of 
these multitudinous millions is derived from other 
sources than Agriculture, this circumstance is 
balanced by the fact that there is a great deal of 
agricultural produce raised in excess of the total 
demand for food. Let then the thoughtful hus- 
bandman, who desires to form a just idea of the 
importance of his pursuit, reflect, when he gathers 
his little flock about him to partake the morning's 
meal, that one thousand millions of fellow men 
have awakened from sleep that morning, craving 



10 

their daily bread, with the same appetite which 
reigns at his flimil}^ board ; and that if, by a supe- 
rior power, they couki be gathered together at the 
same hour for the same meal, they would fill both 
sides of five tables reaching all round the globe 
where it is broadest, seated side by side, and 
allowing eighteen inches to each individual ; and 
that these tables are to be renewed twice or thrice 
every day. Then let him consider that, in addi- 
tion to the food of the human race, that of all the 
the humble partners of man's toil — the lower ani- 
mals — is to be provided in like manner. These 
all wait upon Agriculture, as the agent of that 
Providence which giveth them their meat in due 
season ; and they probably consume in the aggre- 
gate an equal amount of produce : and finally let 
him add in imagination to this untold amount of 
daily food for man and beast the various articles 
which are furnished directly or indirectly from 
the soil, for building material, furniture, clothing, 
and fuel. 

The grand total will illustrate the primary 
importance of Agriculture, considered as the 
steward — the commissary — charged with supply- 
ing this almost inconceivable daily demand of the 
human race and the subject animals far their daily 



11 

bread ; a want so imperative and uncompromising, 
that death in its most agonizing form is the penalty 
of a faihire in the supply. 

But although Agriculture is clothed with an 
importance which rests upon the primitive consti- 
tution of our nature, it is very far from being the 
simple concern we are apt to think it. On the 
contrary, there is no pursuit in life which not 
only admits, but requires, for its full development, 
more of the resources of science and art — none 
which would better repay the pains ])estowed 
upon an appropriate echication. There is, I 
believe, no exaggeration in stating that as great 
an amount and variety of scientific, physical, and 
mechanical knowledge is required for the most 
successful conduct of the various oj)erations of 
husbandry, as for any of the arts, trades, or pro- 
fessions. I conceive, therefore, that the legisla- 
ture and the citizens of the great State over 
which you. Sir, (Governor King) so worthily pre- 
side, have acted most wisely in making provision 
for the establishment of an institution expressly 
for agricultural education. There is a demand 
for systematic scientific instruction, from the very 
first steps we take, not in the play-farming of 



\ 



12 

gentlemen of leisure, but in the pursuit of hus- 
bandry as the serious business of life. 

In the first place, the earth which is to be 
cultivated, instead of being either a uniform or a 
homogeneous mass, is made up of a variety of 
materials, differing in different places, and possess- 
ing different chemical and agricultural properties 
and qualities. A few of these elements, and 
especially clay, lime and sand, predominate, usu- 
ally intermixed to some extent by nature, and 
capable of being so mingled and treated by art, 
as to produce a vastly increased fertility. The 
late Lord Leicester in England, better known as 
Mr. Coke, first carried out this idea on a large 
scale, and more than doubled the productive value 
of his great estates in Norfolk by claying his light 
soils. To conduct operations of this kind, some 
knowledge of geology, mineralogy and chemistry, 
is required. The enrichment of the earth by 
decaying animal and vegetable substances is the 
most familiar operation perhaps in husbandry ; 
but it is only since its scientific principles have 
been explored by Davy and Liebig, that the great 
practical improvements in this branch of agricul- 
ture have taken place. It is true that the almost 
boundless natural fertility of the soil supercedes 



13 

for the present, in some parts of our country, the 
importance of artificial enrichment. I inquired 
last spring of a friend living in a region of this 
kind, on the hanks of the Ohio, how they con- 
trived to ijrct rid of the accumulation of the farm- 
yard, (a strange question it will seem to farmers 
in this part of the world) and he answered, " B}^ 
carting it down to the river's side, and emptying- 
it into the stream." In another portion of the 
western country, where I had seen hemp growing 
vigorously about thirty years ago, I found that 
wheat was now the prcv^ailing crop. I Avas 
informed that the land was originally so rich as to 
be adapted only for hemp, but had now become 
poor enough for wheat. 

These, however, are not instances of a perma- 
nent and normal condition of things. In the 
greater part of the Union, especially in those 
portions which have been for some time under cul- 
tivation, the annual exhaustion must be restored 
by the annual renovation of the soil. To accom- 
plish this object, of late years every branch of 
science, every resource of the laboratory, every 
kingdom of nature, have been placed under contri- 
bution. Battle fields have been dug over for the 
bones of their victims ; Geology has furnished 



14 

lime, gypsum and marl ; Commerce has explored 
the remotest seas for guano, and has called loudly 
on Diplomacy to assist her efforts ; Chemistry has 
been tasked for the productions of compounds, 
which, in the progress of science, may supersede 
those of animal or vegetable origin which are pre- 
pared by nature. The nutritive principles deve- 
loped by decaying animal and vegetable organi- 
zations are universally diffused throughout the 
material world, and the problem to be solved is to 
produce them artificially on the large scale, cheap 
enough for general use. In the mean time the 
most simple and familiar processes of enrichment, 
with the aid of mechanical power and a mode- 
rate application of capital, are producing the 
most astonishing results. The success which has 
attended Mr. Mechi's oj)erations in England is 
familiar to us all. By the application of natural 
fertilizing liquids, sprinkled by a steam engine 
over his fields, they have been made to produce, 
it is said, seven annual crops of heavy grass. 

Simple water is one of the most effectual fer- 
tilizers, and in some countries irrigation, carried 
on with no moderate degree of hydraulic skill, is 
the basis of their husbandry. While walking, on 
one occasion, with the late Lord Ashburton, in his 



15 

delightful grounds in Hampshire, just before he 
departed on his special mission to this country, 
in one of the intervals of our earnest conference 
on the Northeastern Boundary, he told me that 
he had expended ten thousand jDOunds sterling 
in conducting round his fields the waters of the 
little river — the Itchen, I think — that flows 
through the pro23erty, and that it was money well 
laid out. Pardon me the digression of a moment 
to say that I could not but honor the disinterested 
patriotism which led this kind-hearted, upright 
and intelligent man, at an advanced age (with 
nothing on earth to gain or desire, and with every- 
thing of reputation to risk,) to leave the earthly 
paradise in which I saw him, and to cross the 
Atlantic in the winter in a sailing vessel, (his 
voyage was of fifty-one days) to do his part in 
adjusting a controversy which had seriously 
menaced the peace of the two countries. The 
famous water-meadows of the Duke of Portland, 
at Clipstone, have been often described, where the 
same operation has been performed on a still more 
extensive scale. Mr. Colman's interesting volumes 
on European agriculture contain accounts of other 
works of this kind, but I confine myself to those 
which have fallen under my own observation. 



16 

Nor are these the only operations in which 
Agriculture calls for the aid of well-instructed 
skill. That moisture, which in moderation is the 
great vehicle of vegetable nourishment, may exist 
in excess. Vast tracts of land are lost to hus- 
bandry in this country, w^hich might be reclaimed 
by dykes and embankments, or become fertile by 
drainage. Land is yet too abundant and cheajD in 
America to admit of great expenditures in this 
way, except in very limited localities; but the 
time will no doubt come when, in the populous 
portions of the country, especially in the neigh- 
borhood of large cities, the sunken marshes which 
now stretch along our coast will be reclaimed from 
the ocean, as in Holland ; and thousands of acres 
in the interior, now given up to alder swamps and 
cranberry meadows, be clothed with grass and corn. 
There are few farms of any size in the country 
which do not contain waste spots of this kind — 
the harbor of turtles, frogs and serpents — which 
might be brought, at moderate expense and 
some hydraulic skill, into cultivation. Other 
extensive tracts are awaiting the time when the 
increase of population and the enhanced value of 
land will bear the expense of costly operations in 
engineering. The marshes on the sea-coast of 



17 

New England, New York and New Jersey, proba- 
bly exceed in the aggregate the superficies of the 
kingdom of the Netherlands, the greater part of 
Avhicli has been redeemed by artificial means 
from the ocean — a considerable tract, covered by 
the lake of Harlem, within a few years. Now, 
if we could add a new territory to the Union, as 
large as the kingdom of the Netherlands, l)y the 
peaceful operations of husbandry, it would be a 
species of annexation to which I for one should 
make no objection. All the resources of science 
have been called into operation in that country, 
mider the direction of a se2:)arate department of 
the government, to sustain the hydraulic works 
which protect it from the ocean. The state of 
things is similar in the fens of Lincolnshire and 
Bedfordshire. All the spare revenues of the 
Grand Duke of Tuscany have been ap2)ropriated 
for years to the improvement of the low grounds 
on the coast of that country, once the abode of 
the powerful Etruscan confederacy, which ruled 
Italy before the ascendancy of the Romans, now 
and for ages past a malarious, uninhabitable waste. 
But when science and art have done their best 
for the preparation of the soil, they have but 
commenced their operations in tlie lowest depart- 



18 

ment of agriculture. They have dealt thus far only 
with what we call lifeless nature, though I apply 
that word with reluctance to the genial bosom 
of our mother Earth, from which everything that 
germinates draws its life and appropriate nour- 
ishment. Still, however, we take a great step 
upward, when, in pursuing the operations of hus- 
bandry, we ascend from mineral and inorganic sub- 
stances to vegetable organization. We now enter 
a new world of agricultural research ; the mys- 
teries of assimilation, growth and decay ; of seed 
time and harvest ; the life, the death, and the re- 
production, of the vegetable world. Here we still 
need the light of science, but rather to explore and 
reveal than to imitate the operations of nature. 
The skilful agricultural chemist can mingle soils 
and compound fertilizing phosphates; but, with 
all his apparatus and all his re-agents, it is beyond 
his power to fabricate the humblest leaf. He can 
give you, to the thousandth part of a grain, the 
component elements of wheat; he can mingle 
those elements in due proportion in his labora- 
tory ; but to manufacture a single kernel, endowed 
with living, reproductive power, is as much beyond 
Ills skill as to create a world. 



19 

Vegetable life, therefore, requires a new course 
of study and instruction. The adaptation of par- 
ticular plants to particular soils and their treat- 
ment, on the one hand, and on the other, their 
nutritive powers as food for man and the lower 
animals, the laws of germination and growth, 
the influences of climate, the possible range of 
improvability in cereal grains and fruits, are topics 
of vast importance. The knowledge — for tlxe 
most part emjDirical — already possessed upon 
these points, is the accumulation of the ages which 
have elapsed since the foundation of the world, 
each of which has added to the list its generous 
fruit, its nutritive grain, its esculent root, its tex- 
tile fibre, its brilliant tincture, its spicy bark, 
its exhilarating juice, its aromatic essence, its 
fragrant gum, its inflammable oil ; some so long- 
ago that the simple gratitude of infant humanity 
ascribed them to the gift of the gods, while others 
have been brought to the knowledge of the civil- 
ized world in the historical jDcriod, and others 
have been presented to mankind by our own con- 
tinent. No one can tell when wheat, barley, rye, 
oats, millet, apples, j)ears and plums, were first 
cultivated in Europe ; but cherries and peaches 
were brought from the Black Sea and Persia in 



1^0 

the time of the Roman republic ; the culture of 
silk was introduced from the East in the reign of 
Justinian; cotton and sugar became extensively 
used in Europe in the middle ages ; maize, the 
potato, tobacco, cocoa, and the Peruvian bark, are 
the indigenous growth of this country. Tea and 
coffee, though productions of the Old World, were 
first known in Western Europe about two centu- 
ries ago ; and India rubber and gutta ^^ercha, as 
useful as any but the cereals, in our own day. 

There is much reason to believe, as our inter- 
course with Eastern Asia, Polynesia, and Australia 
increases, that new vegetable products will become 
known to us, of the greatest interest and import- 
ance for food, medicine, and clothing. Many, 
with which we are acquainted only in the writings 
of travellers and botanists, will unquestionably be 
domesticated. The most interesting experiments 
are in progress on the sugar canes of Africa and 
China; and there is scarce a doubt that the most 
important additions will, in the course of time, 
be made to our vegetable treasures from the latter 
country. China, like North America, forms tlie 
eastern shore of a great ocean, with a cold north- 
western region in the rear. Its climate, under 
similar local conditions, closely resembles our 



21 

own ; and there is reason to believe that what- 
ever grows there will grow here. A somewhat 
curious illustration of this is found in the plant 
ging-seng, to which the Chinese formerly attached, 
perhaps still attach, such a superstitious value. 
Its bifurcated root, as they thought, symbolized 
humanity, which indeed it does, as well as Fal- 
staft^'s "forked radish;" and hence the name 
ging-seng, or " man-plant." They called it " the 
pure spirit of the earth," and the " plant that 
gives immortality." They deemed it the exclu- 
sive product of the central flowery kingdom — a 
panacea for every form of disease, cheaply bought 
for its weight in silver. A Je suite missionary to 
China, Lafitau, being transferred to America 
early in the last century, discovered the j)recious 
j)lant in our own woods, where, indeed, in some 
parts of the country, it abounds. It began to be 
cx23orted by the French to China, and after the 
commencement of our commercial intercourse 
with that country, at the close of the war of the 
Rovolution, this much-prized root was sent in 
great quantities to Canton, and, nuich to the per- 
plexity and disgust of the Mandarins, Ijecame 
literally a drug in the market, losing most of 



22 

its mysterious efficacy, in proportion as it was 
abundantly supplied by the outside barbarians. 

But, without wandering so far for additions 
entirely novel which may be expected to our 
vegetable stores, I cannot but regard what may 
be called organic husbandry as one of the richest 
departments of science, and one which is as yet 
almost wholly in its infancy. What wonders are 
revealed to us by the microscope in the structure 
and germination of the seed ! — the instinct, so to 
say, of radicle and plumule, which bids one seek 
the ground, and the other shoot up toward the 
air ; the circulation of the sap, which, examined 
under a high magnifying power, in a succulent 
plant — the Calla, for instance — resembles a flow- 
ing stream of liquid silver — a spectacle, in these 
days of " susjDension," to make a man's mouth 
water; the curious confectionary that secretes 
sugar, and gluten, and starch, and oil, and woody 
fibre, and flower, and fruit, and leaf, and bark, 
from the same elements in earth and air, differing 
in each difiering plant, though standing side by 
side in the same soil ; in a word, the wonders and 
beauties of this annual creation — for such it is — 
as miraculous as that by which sun, and moon. 



23 

and stars, and earth, and sea, and man, were first 
formed by the hand of Omnipotence ! 

And who shall limit the progress of science, 
and its application to the service of man, in this 
bomidless field ? The grafting of generous fruits 
on barren stocks is as old as European civilization ; 
but the artificial hybridization of flowers and 
fruits is a recent practice, which has already filled 
our conservatories with the most beautiful flowers, 
and our graperies and gardens with the choicest 
varieties of fruit. When reasoning man does Avitli 
science and skill what has been hitherto left to 
the winds and the bees, the most important results 
may be anticipated. Modern chemistry has shown 
that the growth of the plant is not one simple 
operation, but that different ingredients in the 
soil, and different fertilizing substances, afford the 
appropriate nourishment to different portions of 
the plant. This discovery will, no doubt, be of 
great importance in the higher 023erations of hor- 
ticulture and pomology. 

The culture of the grape and the mauuiac- 
ture of wine, have already become considerable 
branches of industry, and aftbrd great scope for 
the application of chemical knowledge. The 
vineyards in the neighborhood of Cincinnati and 



24 

St. Louis, though limited in extent, already bear, 
in other respects, a creditable comparison with 
those of Europe. All the jorocesses of manufac- 
ture rival those of the province of Champagne 
and the Rhine, both in integrity and skill — a 
remark which I venture to make from some oppor- 
tunities of personal comparison. Time, no doubt, 
will eventually bring to light a belt of territory — 
probably in the interior, or in the Western por- 
tion of the continent (for we do not find wine in 
the eastern portion of Asia) — which will equal 
the most delicate vintages of Burgundy, Bordeaux, 
or Xeres. 

Nor is it less probable that many vegetable 
products now imported from foreign countries will 
be naturalized here. It is but a century since 
the first experiments were made on the American 
continent in the cultivation of rice and cotton ; 
and there is no reason to doubt that whatever the 
Old World jiroduces will flourish within the same 
isothermal lines in this hemisphere. The recent 
agricultural reports from the patent office contain 
very important indications and suggestions on 
this branch of husbandry. 

The condition of our native forests opens 
another broad liehl of incpiiry in agricultural 



25 

science, under three very striking aspects. The 
extensive prairies of the West, denuded of wood 
for an unknown length of time, and under the 
operation of causes not perhaps certainl}?- made 
out, await from the settler's skill and industry 
those plantations which add so much to the beauty 
and salubrity of the soil, and contribute so mate- 
rially to the service of man. In the mean time 
it is a very important question, in a broad region 
of the West, whether anything cheaper and more 
effectual than the Osage orange (Madura) can be 
found for fencing. In other portions of the coun- 
try a condition of things exists the precise reverse 
of that just described ; and immense tracts of 
native forest, covering the land for hundreds of 
miles Avith a matted, impervious, repulsive wilder- 
ness, form a very serious impediment to cultiva- 
tion, and constitute one of the great hardships 
which attend the pioneer of settlement. The 
opening of railroads through extensive districts 
of this description, with the intense demand for 
land, caused in part by the unexampled emigra- 
tion from Europe, will probably lead to new appli- 
cations of steam power, machinery, and caj^ital, 
in the first clearing of the land ; and thus mate- 
rially facilitate the process of bringing it into 



26 

cultivation. In the mean time, in the older 
settled parts of the country, we have some back- 
ward steps to take. The clothing of the sterile 
hill-sides and barren plains with wood is an object 
of great interest. The work of destruction has 
been carried on with too little discrimination. 
Too little thought has been had of that noblest 
spectacle in the vegetable world, plantations of 
trees for ornament and shade ; too little consider- 
ation for a permanent supply of the demand for 
timber and fuel. 

Every topic to which I have thus hastily 
allued, in connection with the vegetable kingdoms 
of nature, suggests inquiry for the naturalist, in 
some department of his studies, and forms the 
subject of regular courses of instruction in some 
of the European universities, especially those in 
Germany. 

The insects and vermin injurious to vegetation 
present another curious and difficult subject of 
inquiry. A very considerable part of every crop 
of grain and fruit is planted, not for the mouths 
of our children, but for the fly, the curculio, and 
the canker-worm, or some other of these pests of 
husbandry. Science has done something, and 
will no doubt do more, to alleviate the plague. It 



27 • 

has already taught us not to wage equal war on 
the wheat-fly and the parasite which preys upon 
it; and it will, perhaps, eventually persuade 
those who need the lesson, that a few peas and 
cherries, are w^ell bestowed by way of desert on 
the cheerful little warblers who turn our gardens 
into concert-rooms, and do so much to aid us in 
the warfare against the grubs and caterpillars 
which form their principal meal. 

Agriculture is looking anxiously to science for 
information on the nature and remedies of the 
formidable disease which has of late years 
destroyed so large a portion of the potato crop. 
The naturalist who shall solve that problem will 
stand high among the benefactors of his race. 

Closely connected with this department of 
Agriculture is another, in which the modern arts 
have made great progress, and in which invent- 
ive sagacity is still diligently and successfully 
employed — I refer to agricultural machinery — 
improved implements of husbandry. This is a 
field in which the creative powers of the mind 
seem to be at work with an activity never before 
equalled, and which is likely to produce more 
important results in this than in any other coun- 
try. The supply of labor in the United States 



28 

has not kept pace with the demand, as it can 
rarely do in a new countrj^, were strong tempta- 
tions exist for enterprising attempts in every 
branch of industry. This state of things has 
furnished very powerful inducements for the 
introduction of labor-saving machinery and imple- 
ments, and the proverbial ingenuity of our coun- 
trymen has been turned with great success in that 
direction. Your exhibition grounds fully justify 
this remark. Even the good old 23lough has become 
almost a new machine in its various novel forms ; 
and other implements of the most ingenious contri- 
vance and efficient action have been invented. 
The cultivator, the horse rake, the mowing 
machine, the reaper, and the threshing machine, 
are daily coming into use in Europe and America, 
and jDroducing the most imjDortant economy of 
labor. Successful attempts are making to work 
them by steam. It was said long ago of the cotton 
gin, by Mr. Justice Johnson of the Supreme Court 
of the United States, that it had doubled the value 
of the lands in the cotton-growing region ; and 
the mowing machine, the reaper, and the thresh- 
ing machine, are destined, almost to the same 
extent, to alleviate the severest labors of the 
farmer's year. The fame of the reaper is not 



29 

confined to this hemisphere. At the great Exhi- 
bition of the Industry of all Nations, in London, 
in 1851, it mainly contributed to enaJjle American 
art to hold uj) her head in the face of the civilized 
world.* 

* The first of the following extracts is copied from the Boston Traveler 
of the 23d September, 1857; the second from a recent number of the 
London Illustrated A^'ews. I have no means of verifying tlie accuracy of 
the statements : 

" Agricultuke at the AVest. — The scarcity of labor, and the enter- 
j)rise of the emigrants and speculators, has led to the introduction of 
more labor-saving machinery upon tlie farms in our Western States than 
anywhere else in tlie world. A correspondent of the Cincinnati Daily 
Gazette saj- s, among other improvements steam-power threshing machines 
are fast coming into use. The writer describes one he had just seen in 
operation on the farm of Dr. Watts, in Chillicothe. The wlieat fields on 
this farm cover, the present year, three hundred and eighty-seven acres, 
which have produced some eight or ten thousand bushels of grain. He 
found the threshing ground very much like a village of straw-ricks, in 
the midst of which was a putting engine, making the wheels of a machine 
tly, while men, horses, oxen and wagons were kept busy sui)plying its 
wants. The machine, and three men to tend it,, are furnished for five 
cents a bushel threshed. The consumption of wood is about one and 
a quarter cords per day, at two dollars and a half per cord. The price 
of farm labor there now is one dollar per day and board. 

" The machine, when in active operation, threshed two bushels a 
minute, and on an average threshes seven hundred bushels a day. This 
is the work of seventy men in the old way of threshing by flail. The 
proprietor of the machine had more applications tlian he could sujiply, 
and his next engagements were lor fifteen hundred acres of grain owned 
by five proprietors, and yet this is not one of the great wheat counties 
of the State. Agricultural machinery of all kinds is extending rapidly 
through the West. The county of Pickaway now employs three hundred 
and fifty mowing and reaping machines. Some of the interior counties 
have great manufacturing establishments for this machinery." 

" A con-espondent of the Chicago Tribune says that, being in Kock 
county, Illinois, in the middle of August, 1857, he went uj) to the top of 
a hill called Mount Zion, six miles from .Tanesville, and counted on 



30 

But there is still another department of Agri- 
culture, which opens the door to research of a 
higher order, and deals with finer elements — I 
mean that which regards the domestic animals 
attached to the service of man, and which are of 
such inestimahle importance as the direct partners 
of his labors, as furnishing one of the great arti- 
cles of his food, and as a principal resource for 
restoring the exhausted fertility of the soil. In 
the remotest ages of antiquity, into which the 
torch of history throws not the faintest gleam of 
light, a small number, selected from the all but 
numberless races of the lower animals, were 
adopted by domestication into the family of man. 
So skilful and exhaustive was this selection, that 
three thousand years of experience, during which 
Europe and America have been settled by civil- 
ized races of men, have not added to the number. 
It is somewhat humbling to the pride of our 
rational nature to consider how much of our civili- 
zation rest on this partnership ; how helpless we 
should be, deprived of the horse, the ox, the cow, 

the surrounding plain one hundred and fifty four-horse-power reaping 
machines, busily cutting down wheat. There w-ere a thousand men, 
women and boys following, binding and shocking up the golden sheaves. 
It was a sight worth seeing to behold the grain falling and gathered up 
at the rate of two hundred acres per hour." 



the sheep, the swine, the goat, the ass, the rein- 
deer, the dog, the cat, and the various kinds of 
poultry. In the warmer regions this list is 
enlarged by the llama, the elephant, and the 
camel, the latter of which, it is not unlikely, will 
be extensively introduced in our own southern 
region. 

It may be said of this subject, as of that to 
which I have already alluded, that it is a science of 
itself. No branch of husbandry has, within the last 
century, engaged more of the attention of farmers, 
theoretical and practical, than the improvement 
of the breed of domestic animals, and in none 
perhaps has the attention thus bestowed been bet- 
ter repaid. By judicious selection and mixtures 
of the parent stock, and by intelligence and care in 
the training and nourishing of the young animals, 
the imj^roved breeds of the present day differ 
probably almost as much from their predecessors 
a hundred years ago, as we may suppose the entire 
races of domesticated animals do from the wild 
stocks from which they are descended. 

There is no reason to suppose that the utmost 
limit of improvement has been reached in this 
direction. Deriving our improved animals as we 
generally do irom Europe — that is, from a climate 



32 

differing materially from our own — it is not 
unlikely that, in the lapse of time, experience 
will lead to the production of a class of animals, 
better adapted to the peculiarities of our seasons 
than any of the transatlantic varieties as they now 
exist. The bare repetition of the words, draft, 
speed, endurance, meat, milk, butter, cheese, and 
w^ool, wdll suggest the vast importance of con- 
tinued experiments on this subject, guided by all 
the lights of physiological science. 

Among the most prominent desiderata, in what 
may be called animal husbandry, may be men- 
tioned an improved state of veterinary science 
in this country. While the anatomy of the lower 
animals is substantially the same as man's, their 
treatment when diseased, or overtaken by acci- 
dents, is left almost wholly to uneducated empiri- 
cism. It rarely, I may say never happens, that 
the substantial farmer has not considerable pro- 
perty invested in live stock, to say nothing of the 
personal attachment he often feels for some of his 
favorites — horse, or cow, or dog. But when their 
frames, as delicately organized and as sensitive as 
our own, are attacked by disease, or they meet 
with a serious accident, they are of necessity in 
most parts of the country committed to the care 



of persons wholly ignorant of anatomy and physi- 
ology, or imperfectly acquainted with them, and 
whose skill is comprehended in a few rude tradi- 
tionary operations and nostrums. There are few 
of us, I suppose, who have not had some painful 
experience on this subject, both in our pockets 
and our feelings. The want of veterinary insti- 
tutions, and of a class of well educated practi- 
tioners, is yet to be su^^plied. 

This hasty survey of the different branches of 
Agriculture, imperfect as practical men nnist 
regard it, has, I think, shown that it opens a wide 
field for scientific research, and demands an appro- 
priate education. It is, in fact, in all respects a 
liberal pursuit and as such ought to be regarded 
by the community. It is greatly to be desired 
that public opinion in America should undergo 
some change in this respect. There is no want 
of empty compliments to the " Independent Yeo- 
manry " at public festivals and electioneering- 
assemblages. When the popular ear is to be 
tickled, and the popular sufirage conciliated, 
the "substantial farmer" is sure to be addressed 
in honeyed phrase; but the most superficial 
observation of society shows that the learned pro- 
fessions, as they are denominated — the various 



34 

kinds of " business," as it is significantly called, 
as if j^eojDle could not busy themselves to any 
purpose, except in some kind of traffic — and in 
preference to both, or in conjunction with both, 
political employment, are regarded as the envia- 
ble pursuits of life. It is not altogether so in the 
country from which the majority of the people of 
America are descended. In England the ultimate 
object of a liberal ambition is the ownership of a 
handsome landed property, and the actual man- 
agement by the j)roprietor of a considerable por- 
tion of it. Great fortunes, however acquired, are 
almost sure to be invested in great landed estates. 
Whether emjDloyed in the professions or in com- 
merce, men escape from city life as from confine- 
ment, and the country seat is generally the family 
mansion. 

It would be absurd to deny the manifold 
importance of great commercial towns in our 
social system. They are not the mere result of 
calculation ; they grow up by an irresistable neces- 
sity. The intense life which springs from their 
stern competition undoubtedly performs a most 
important office in the progress of civilization. 
The faculties are sharpened by the direct contact 
and collision of kindred minds. The 2;reat accu- 



35 

mulations of capital, which almost exclusively 
take jilace in commerce and the occuj)ations 
connected, with it, exercise an all-powerful influ- 
ence in the community, and are felt in all 
its enterprises. The social sympathies gather 
warmth and force from the generous contagion of 
congenial natures. But society is in its hajDpiest 
state when town and country act and react upon 
each other to mutual advantage ; Avhen the sim- 
Y>leY manners and purer tastes of rural life are 
brought to invigorate the moral atmosphere of 
the metropolis, and when a fair ^^roportion of 
the wealth acquired in the city flows back and 
is invested in landed improvements ; transferring 
cultivated tastes and liberal arts from crowded 
avenues and ringing pavements to the open, 
healthful country, and connecting them with its 
substantial interests and calm pursuits. 

In acknowledging, as I do most cheerfully, the 
important relations of city life and commercial 
pursuits to the entire social system of the country, 
I leave of course out of the account — I have no 
words but of abhorrence — for the organized consjDi- 
racies, swindling and plunder, which exist side by 
side with the legitimate transactions of the stock 
exchange. It is not one of the least perplexing 



6b 



anomalies of modern life and manners, that while 
avowed and thus flir honest gambling (if I may 
connect those words) is driven by public opinion 
and the law, to seclude itself from observation 
within carefully tyled doors, there to fool away 
its hundreds, perhaps its thousands in secret — 
discredited, infamous — blasted by the anathemas 
of deserted, heart-broken wives and beggared 
children — subject at all times to the fell swoop of 
the police — the licensed gambling of the brokers' 
board is carried on in the face of day ; its pre- 
tended sales of what it does not own, its pretended 
purchases of what it does not expect to -pny for, 
are chronicled in the public prints to the extent 
of millions in the course of a season, for the cruel 
and dishonest purpose of frightening innocent 
third parties into the ruinous sacrifice of bona fide 
property, and thus making a guilty profit out of 
the public distress and the ruin of thousands. 

I do not claim for agricultural life in modern 
times the Arcadian simplicity of the heroic ages ; 
but it is capable, with the aid of popular educa- 
tion and the facilities of intercommunication, of 
being made a pursuit more favorable than city 
life to that average degree of virtue and happi- 
ness to which we may reasonably aspire in the 



57 

present imperfect stage of being. For the same 
reason that our intellectual and moral faculties 
are urged to the highest point of culture by the 
intense competition of the large towns, the con- 
tagion of vice and crime produces in a crowded 
population a depravity of character from which the 
more thinly inhabited country, though far enough 
from being immaculate, is comparatively free. 
Accordingly^ w^e find that the tenure on which 
the land is owned and tilled — that is, the average 
condition of the agricultural masses — decides the 
character of a people. It is true that the com- 
pact organization, the control of capital, the 
concentrated pojDular talent, the vigorous press, 
the agitable temperament of the large towns, give 
them an influence out of proportion to numjjers; 
but this is tar less the case in the United States 
than in most foreign countries, where the land is 
held in large masses by a few powerful landhold- 
ers. Divided as it is in this country into small 
or moderate-sized farms, owned, for the most 
jiart, and tilled by a class of fairly-educated, inde- 
jDcndent, and intelligent proprietors, the direct 
influence of large towns on the entire population 
is far less considerable than in Europe. Paris 
can at all times make a revolution in France ; 



but not even your imperial metropolis could make 
a revolution in the United States. What the 
public character loses in concentration and energy 
by this want of metropolitan centralization, is 
more than gained, by the country, in the virtuous 
mediocrity, the decent frugality, the healthful- 
ness, the social tranquility, of private life. I 
trust I do full justice to the elegant refinements, 
the liberal institutions, the noble charities, 
the creative industries, the world-encompassing 
energy, of the cities ; but the profuse expenditure 
of the prosperous, the unfathomed wretchedness of 
the destitute, the heaven-defying profligacy of the 
corrupt, the insane spirit of speculation, the frantic 
haste to become rich, the heartless dissipations of 
fashionable life, the growing ferocity and reckless- 
ness of a portion of the public press, the prevail- 
ing worldliness of the large towns, make me 
tremble for the future. It appears to me that our 
great dependence, under Providence, must be 
more and more on the healthy tone of the poj)u- 
lation scattered over the country, strangers to the 
excitements, the temptations, the revulsions of 
trade, and placed in that happy middle condition 
of human fortune, which is equidistant from the 
giddy heights of affluence, power, and fame, and 



39 

the pinching straits of poverty, and as such most 
favorable to human virtue and happiness. 

While the city is refreshed and renovated by 
the j)ure tides poured from the country into its 
steamy and turbid channels, the cultivation of 
the soil affords at home that moderate excitement, 
healthful occupation, and reasonable return, which 
most conduce to the prosperity and enjoyment of 
life. It is in flict the primitive employment of 
man — first in time, first in importance. The 
newly-created father of mankind was placed by 
the Supreme Author of his being in the garden, 
which the hand of Omnipotence itself had planted, 
"to dress and to keep it." Before the heavino- 
bellows had urged the furnace, before a hammer 
had struck upon an anvil, before the gleaming 
waters had flashed from an oar, before trade had 
hung up its scales or gauged its measures, the 
culture of the soil began. "To dress the garden 
and to keep it" — this was the key-note struck by 
the hand of God himself in that long, joyous, 
wailing, triumphant, troubled, j^ensive strain of 
life-music which sounds through the generations 
and ages of our race. Banished from the garden' 
of Eden, man's merciful sentence — at ouco doom, 
reprieve, and livelihood — was "to till the ground 



40 

from which he was taken," and this, in its primi- 
tive simplicity, was the occupation of the gather- 
ing societies of men. To this wholesome cliscij^le 
the mighty East, in the days of her ascendancy, 
was trained ; and so rapid was her progress that, 
in periods anterior to the dawn of history, she 
had tamed the domestic animals, had saddled the 
horse, and yoked the ox, and milked the cow, and 
sheared the patient sheep, and possessed herself 
of all the cereal grains (with the exception of 
maize, and that controverted,) which feed man- 
kind at the present day. I ohtained from the 
gardens of Chatsworth and sent to this country, 
where they germinated, two specimens of wheat 
raised from grains supposed to have been wrapped 
up in Egyptian mummy-cloths, three thousand 
years ago, and not materially differing from our 
modern varieties; one of them, indeed, being 
precisely identical — thus affording us the pleas- 
ing assurance that the corn which Joseph placed 
in Benjamin's sack before the great Pyramid was 
built was not inferior to the best Genesee of the 
jDresent day. 

Agriculture, I say, was the great j^ursuit of the 
primeval East. Before the intellectual supremacy 
of Greece was developed, while the Macedonian 



41 

sword slept in its scabbard, before the genius of 
military domination was incarnate in the Roman 
legion, while the w\arlike North yet wandered in 
her pathless snows, the Persian traveled fir on the 
road to universal conquest and empire. From the 
Ionian Gulf to the Indus, from the Tanais to the 
sources of the Nile, a hundred and twenty-seven 
satraps, in the name of the great king, adminis- 
tered that law of the Medes and Persians which 
never changed; and throughout this mighty mon- 
archy — one of the most extensive that ever obeyed 
one ruler — next to war, agriculture Avas the hon- 
ored pursuit. On this subject the Greek historian 
Xenophon has preserved to us a charming anec- 
dote. On a certain occasion, one of those half- 
mythical Persian sovereigns, into whose personal 
history the philosophers of Greece delighted to 
weave their highest conceptions of royal polity, 
Cyrus the Younger, received Lysander, the envoy 
of the Grecian allies, at Sardis; and conducting 
him into the royal grounds, pointed out the beauty 
of the plantations, the straight avenues of trees, 
their rectangular disposition, and the fragrant 
shrubbery that shaded the walks. " Truly," cried 
the Spartan warrior, unused to these delightful 
but manly refinements, "I admire the beautiful 



42 

scene, but much more should I admire the artist 
by whose skill it was created." Cyrus, pleased 
with this commendation, exclaimed, " It was all 
laid out and measured by myself, and a portion 
of the trees planted by my own hands." The 
astonished Lacedaemonian chieftain, looking up at 
Cyrus, arrayed, as was and is the fashion of the 
East, in royal purple, his arms and fingers spark- 
ling with rings and bracelets, and his robes exhal- 
ing perfumes, exclaimed, " You have jolanted 
these trees with your own hands?" "Yes, by 
heavens," cried Cyrus, " nor do I ever go to my 
dinner till I have earned my appetite by some 
military or agricultural exercise." The Spartan 
saw in these manly, strength-giving, life-giving 
gymnastics the secret of the power which for the 
time had mastered the world, and clasping the 
hands of the virtuous prince, exclaimed, " Justly 
hast thou prospered, Cyrus ! thou art fortunate 
because thou deservest to be." 

The Persian sank beneath the sword of the 
Macedonian, whose short-lived empire fell with 
its youthful founder. Had Alexander the Great 
planted trees in the interval of his wars, and 
drank water, like Cyrus, he might have lived to 
establish the most extensive empire which the 



43 

world has yet seen. But a new portent of con- 
quest was springing u-p in the West, on the frugal 
acres of Etruria and Latium. That Cincinnatus 
who drove the iEqui and Volsci from the gates of 
Rome ; that Paulus ^milius who led the last king 
of Macedonia with his ftimily in triumph uj) the 
steps of the CajDitol ; that Scipio who at Zama 
forever broke the power of Carthage ; those iron- 
handed, iron-hearted consuls v/ho conducted the 
Roman legions over degenerate Greece, and fiery 
Africa, and effeminate Asia — in the intervals of 
war and conquest tilled their little Latian farms. 
That stern censor, who first made the name of 
austere frugality synonymous with Cato, wrote a 
treatise on the cultivation of the soil ; and so 
sure was a great Roman chief, in the best days of 
the republic, to be found at his farm, that the 
sergeants-at-arms, sent by the Senate to summon 
them to the command of legions and the conquest 
of nations, were technically called viator es, " tra- 
velers." 

At length the Roman civilization perished, 
and a new one, resting on the morality of the 
gospel and the hardy virtues of the northern races, 
took its place, and has subsisted, with gradual 
modifications, to the present day. Its first politi- 



44 

cal development was in the land tenures of the 
feudal system, and it still rests on the soil. Not- 
withstanding the great multiplication of pursuits 
in modern times, the perfection of the useful and 
the fine arts, the astonishing expansion of com- 
mercial, manufacturing and mechanical industry, 
agriculture has kept jDace with the other occujDa- 
tions of society, and continues to be the founda- 
tion of the social system. The tenure, cultivation, 
and produce of the soil still remain the primary 
interests of the community.* The greatest politi- 
cal philosopher and most consummate statesman of 
modern Europe, Edmund Burke, who saw further 
than any of his countrymen into the cloudy future 
which hung over the close of the eighteenth cen- 
tur}^ at the meridian of his life, and while most 
engrossed in public business, purchased a large 
farm. " I have," says he in a letter written to a 
friend in that most critical 3'ear of English poli- 
tics, 1769, "just made a push with all I could 
collect of my own and the aid of my friends, to 
cast a little root in the country. I have purchased 
about six hundred acres of land in Buckingham- 

* " That description of ijroperty (lauded properly) is in its nature tlie 
firm base of every stable government." — Burke's Letters on a Regicide 
Peace. 



45 

shire, about twenty-four miles from London. It 
is a place exceedingly pleasant, and I purpose, 
God willing, to become a farmer in good earnest." 
This his purpose he carried into eftect, and 
adhered to it to the end of his life. Those 
immortal orations, which revived in the British 
senate the glories of the ancient eloquence, were 
meditated in the retirement of Beaconsfield ; and 
there also were composed those all but inspired 
appeals and expostulations, wdiich went to the 
heart of England and Europe in the hour of their 
dearest peril, and did so much to expose the 
deformity and arrest the progress of that godless 
philosophy — specious, arrogant, hypocritical and 
sanguinary — which, with liberty and equality on 
its lips, and plunder, and murder, and treason, in 
its heart, waged deadly war on France and man- 
kind, and closed a professed crusade for republi- 
can freedom by the establishment of a military 
despotism. 

A greater than Burke in this country, our own 
peerless Washington, with a burden of public care 
on his mind such as has seldom weighed upon any 
other person — conscious, through a considerable 
part of his career, that the success not only 
of the American Revolution, jjut of the whole 



46 

great experiment of rejDublican government, was 
dependent in no small degree upon his course and 
conduct — yet gave throughout his life, in time 
of peace, more of his time and attention, as he 
himself in one of his private letters informs us, 
to the superintendence of his agricultural oj)era- 
tions, than to any other object. " It will not be 
doubted," says he, in his last annual message to 
Congress (7th of December, 1796,) " that, with 
reference either to individual or national welfare, 
Agriculture is of primary importance. In pro- 
portion as nations advance in population and other 
circumstances of maturity, this truth becomes 
more apj^arent, and renders the cultivation of the 
soil more and more an object of public patronage. 
^ # ^ Among the means which have been 
employed to this end, none have been attended 
with greater success than the establishment of 
boards, charged with collecting and diffusing 
information, and enabled, by premiums and small 
pecuniary aids, to encourage and assist a spirit of 
discovery and improvement." On the 10th of 
December, 1799, Washington addressed a long 
le'tter to the manager of his farms — the last elabo- 
rate production of his pen — transmitting a plan, 
drawn up on thirty written folio pages, containing 



directions for their cultivation for several years 
to come. In seven days from the date of this 
letter his own venerated form was " sown a natural 
body, to be raised a spiritual body." 

Nearly all the successors of Washington in the 
Presidenc}^ of the United States, both the deceased 
and the living, passed or are passing their closing 
years in the dignified tranquillity of rural pursuits. 
One of the most distinguished of them, Mr. Jef- 
ferson, invented the hill-side plough. Permit me 
also to dwell for a moment on the more recent exam- 
ple of the four great statesmen of the North, the 
West, and the South — whose names are the boast 
and the ornament of the last generation — Adams, 
Calhoun, Clay and Webster, who forgot the colos- 
sal anxieties, the stern contentions, the herculean 
labors, and the thankless sacrifices, of the public 
service, in the retirement of the country, and the 
calm and healthfuP pursuits of Agriculture. One 
of these four great men it was not my fortune 
personally to behold in the enjojanent of these 
calm and rational pleasures, but I well remember 
hearing him say, with a radiant countenance, that 
there was nothing in the triumphs or honors of 
public life so grateful to liis feelings as his return 
to his home in Carolina, at the close of the session 



48 

of Congress, when every individual on liis planta- 
tion, not exce^Dting the humblest, came out to bid 
him welcome and to receive the cordial pressure 
of his hand. I was often the witness of the heart- 
felt satisfaction which Mr. Adams enjoyed on his 
ancestral acres, especially in contemplating the 
trees planted by himself, thousands of which are 
now scattered over the estate. While he minis- 
tered in this way to the gratification and service 
of other times, he felt that he was discharging no 
small portion of the debt which each generation 
owes to its successors. Adopting a tree as the 
device of his seal, he added to it, as the expressive 
motto, the words which Cicero quotes with appro- 
bation from an ancient Latin poet, Alteri sceculo. 
Mr. Adams took particular jpleasure in watching 
the growth of some white maples, the seeds of 
which he had gathered as they dropped from the 
parent trees in front of that venerable hall in 
Philadelphia which echoed to his honored father's 
voice in the great argument of American inde- 
pendence. At Ashland, in 1829, I rode over his 
extensive farm, with the illustrious orator and 
statesman of the West ; and as the " swinish mul- 
titude," attracted by the salt which he liberally 
scattered from bis pocket, came running about us 



49 

in the beaiitifal woodland pasture, carpeted with 
that famous Kentucky l:)hie grass, he good-humor- 
edlj comj)ared them to the office-seekers, who 
hurry to Washington, at the commencement of 
an administration, attracted by the well-flavored 
relish of a good sahiry. Mr. Webster, reposing 
on his farm, at Marshfield, from the toils of the 
foruDi, and the conflicts of the Senate, resembled 
the mighty ocean, which he so nnich loved, which, 
after assaulting the cloudy battlements of the sky, 
with all the seething artillery of his furious bil- 
lows, Avhen the gentle south-west wind sings 
truce to the elemental war, calls home his rolling 
mountains to their peaceful level, and mirrors the 
gracious heavens in his glassy bosom. 

The culture of the soil has, in all ages, been 
regarded as an apj)ropriate and congenial occupa- 
tion for declining life. Cicero, in his admirable 
treatise on " Old Age," speaking in the person of 
Cato the Elder, to whom I have already referred, 
when he comes to consider the pleasures within 
the reach of the aged, gives the most prominent 
place to those which may be enjoyed in agricul- 
tural pursuits. These, he adds, are not impaired 
by the advance of years, and approach, as near as 
possible, to the ideal "life of the Wise Man." 
Guided by the light of nature, he contemplated 



with admiration that "power," as he calls it, of 
the earth, bj which it is enabled to return to the 
husbandman, with usury, what he has committed 
to its trust. It belongs to us, favored with a 
knowledge of the spiritual relations of the universe 
not vouchsafed to the heathen world, to look upon 
agriculture in higher aspects, especially in the 
advance of life ; and as we move forward ourselves 
toward the great crisis of our being, to catch an 
intelligent glimpse of the grand arcana of nature, as 
exhibited in the creative energy of the terrestrial 
elements — the suggestive mystery of the quick- 
ening seed, and the sprouting plant ; the resurrec- 
tion of universal nature from her wintry grave. 

A celebrated sceptical philosopher of the 
last century — the historian Hume — thought to 
demolish the credibility of the Christian Revela- 
tion, by the concise argument, " It is contrary 
to experience that a miracle should be true, but 
not contrary to experience that testimony should 
be false." The last part of the proposition, espe- 
cially in a free country, on the eve of a popular 
election, is, unhappily, too avcU founded ; but in 
what book-worm's dusty cell, tapestried with the 
cobwebs of ages, where the light of real life and 
nature never forced its way — in what pedant's 
school, where deaf ears listen to dumb lips, and 



51 

blind followers are led by blind guides — did he 
learn that it is contrary to experience that a mira- 
cle should be true ? Most certainly he never 
learned it from sower or reaper — from dumb ani- 
mal, or rational man connected with husbandry. 
Poor Red-Jacket, off here on Buffalo Creek, if he 
could have comprehended the terms of the pro- 
position, would have treated it with scorn. Con- 
trary to experience that phenomena should exist 
which we cannot trace to causes perceptible to the 
human sense, or conceivable by human thouglit ! 
It would 1je much nearer the truth to say that 
within the husbandman's experience there are no 
phenomena which can be rationally traced to any- 
thing but the instant energy of creative power. 

Did this philosopher ever contemplate the 
landscape at the close of the year, when seeds, 
and grains, and fruits have ripened, and stalks 
have withered, and leaves have fallen, and winter 
has forced her icy curb even into the roaring jaws 
of Niagara, and sheeted half a continent in her 
jilittering shroud, and all this teemins; veo-etation 
and organized life are locked in cold and marble 
obstruction ; and, after week upon week and 
month upon month have swept, with sleet, and 
chilly rain, and howling storm, over the earth, and 
riveted their crystal bolts upon the door of nature's 



sepulchre — when the sun at length begins to 
wheel in higher circles through the sky, and softer 
winds to breathe over melting snows ; did he ever 
behold the long-hidden earth at length appear, 
and soon the timid grass peep forth, and anon the 
autumnal wheat begin to paint the field, and velvet 
leaflets to burst from purple buds, throughout the 
reviving forest ; and then the mellow soil to open 
its fruitful bosom to every grain and seed dropped 
from the planter's hand, buried but to spring up 
again, clothed with a new mysterious being ; and 
then as more fervid suns inflame the air, and softer 
showers distil from the clouds, and gentler dews 
string their pearls on twig and tendril, did he 
ever watch the ripening grain and fruit, pendent 
from stalk, and vine, and tree ; the meadow, the 
field, the pasture, the grove, each after his kind 
arrayed in myriad-tinted garments, instinct with 
circulating life ; seven millions of counted leaves 
on a single tree,* each of which is a system whose 
exquisite complication puts to shame the shrewdest 
cunning of the human hand; every planted seed 
and grain, which had been loaned to the earth, com- 
pounding its pious usury thirty, sixty, a hundred 
fold — all harmoniously adapted to the sustenance 
of living nature — the bread of a hungry world ; 

* Johnson's Chemistry of Common Life, I., p. 13. 



53 

here a tilled cornfield, whose j-ellow blades are 
nodding with the food of man ; there an unplanted 
wilderness — the great Father's farm — wdiere he 
" who hears the raven's cry " has cnltivated, 
with his own hand, his merciful crop of berries, 
and nuts, and acorns, and seeds, for the hum- 
bler families of animated nature — the solemn 
elejDliant, the browsing deer, the wild pigeon, 
whose fluttering caravan darkens the sky — the 
merry squirrel, who Ijounds from branch to branch, 
in the joy of his little life ; has ho seen all this — 
does he see it every year, and month, and day — 
does he live, and move, and breathe, and think, in 
this atmosphere of wonder — himself the greatest 
wonder of all, whose smallest fibre and faintest pul- 
sation is as much a mystery as the blazing glories 
of Orion's belt, — and does he still maintain that 
a miracle is contrary to experience ? If he has, 
and if he does, then let him go, in the name of 
Heaven, and say that it is contrary to experience 
that the August Power which turns the clods of 
the earth into the daily Ijread of a thousand 
million of souls could feed five thousand in the 
wilderness ! 

One more suggestion, my friends, and I relieve 
your patience. As a work of art, I know few things 
more pleasing to the eye, or more capable of aftbrd- 



56 

E,osa Boiilieur never painted, roam the pastures, 
or fill the hurdles and the stalls ; the plough walks 
in rustic majesty across the plain, and opens the 
genial bosom of the, earth to the sun and air; 
nature's holy sacrament of seed-time is solemnized 
beneath the vaulted cathedral sky; silent dews, 
and gentle showers, and kindly sunshine, shed 
their sweet influence on the teeming soil ; spring- 
ing verdure clothes the plain ; golden wavelets, 
driven by the west wind, run over the joyous 
wheat-field ; the tall maize Haunts in her crispy 
leaves and nodding tassels : while we labor and 
while we rest, while we wake and while we sleej), 
God's chemistry, which we cannot see, goes on 
beneath the clods; myriads and myriads of vital 
ells, ferment with elemental life ; germ and stalk, 
and leaf and flower, and silk and tassel, and grain 
and fruit, grow up from the common earth; the 
mowing machine and the reaper — mute rivals of 
human industry — perform their gladsome task ; 
the well-piled wagon brings home the ripened 
treasures of the year; the bow of promise ful- 
filled spans the foreground of the picture, and 
the gracious covenant is redeemed, that while the 
earth remaineth, summer and winter, and heat 
and cold, and day and night, and seed-time and 
harvest, shall not f'nil. 



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